A private branch exchange (PBX) is a telephone system typically owned and operated by a business organization or enterprise. The PBX typically provides services, such as switching of telephone calls, conference calls, call forwarding and voice mail, to users of the enterprise. Recent advances in technology have resulted in the provision of high-availability and reliable computing being delivered as a service to the users of the enterprise. A telephone communication system may be configured to provide such computing (“cloud computing”) to render telephony services, including those provided by a PBX, to its users (customers) over a computer network. The customers may be dispersed throughout many geographical regions and, as such, may present certain challenges or demands to delivery of these telephony services. To that end, the telephone communication system may include a plurality of geographically dispersed components organized to efficiently service telephony requests, such as telephone calls, issued by the customers.
However, contention among the components to service the telephony requests may introduce imbalances in the telephone communication system, thereby adversely affecting the performance of the system. For instance, the processing load (i.e., workload) on one or more of the components may become imbalanced due to, e.g., the component receiving an increased number of requests to render the telephony services. The increased number of requests may be attributed to location-based factors, such as proximity of the component to a customer issuing the telephony request, e.g., a local component geographically situated relatively close to the customer may have the benefit of a shorter distance to receive and respond to the requests than a remote component situated relatively far away from the customer. In addition, imbalances in the workload of the components may be attributed to network infrastructure-based factors, such as the available bandwidth (or lack thereof) during business hours of the enterprise. The workload imbalance may adversely affect the processing performance of the component, e.g., by creating a “hot-spot” in the system which, in turn, may result in decreased telephony service performance of the telephone communication system.